the purpose of this two-phase, sequential mixed methods study was to find out whether there were any decencies between male and female ma students’ theses regarding the common features of academic writing such as syntactic complexity, means of integrating cited information, and organizing arguments. i chose 10 male written theses and 15 female written theses in tefl and linguistics. in the first phase, the t-unit analysis was applied to measure the syntactic complexity of the corpus. the number of t-units and clauses of each text and the frequency of the occurrence of the cohesive devices in both males’ and females’ writings were counted; the number of direct quotations, paraphrases, and summaries from each thesis were calculated to find out the frequency of the occurrence of means of integrating cited information. these data were analyzed through the statistical program spss. in the second phase, the methods of presenting arguments were analyzed. the results of this study showed significant differences between men’s and women’s texts in syntactic complexity, means of integrating cited information, and organizing arguments. the structure of women’s texts tended to be more complex than men’s. the women also used more paraphrases to integrate cited information, but the two gender groups used similar forms of direct quotations. furthermore, women presented better organized arguments. these gender differences do not necessarily discourage efl male learners to acquire higher proficiency in academic writing, but rather become valuable input to the process of learning and teaching of academic writing in higher education. so, practitioners should take into consideration different possible teaching and learning strategies for writing to encourage efl male learners to become more motivated and proficient in academic writing. it also may be essential that more varied learning strategies in writing are offered for students, especially male students, in order to accommodate for these gender differences. it is important for educators to be aware of specific gender differences in writing performance in the classroom. teachers and other education professionals should note that literacy may be a recurring problem for all under-achievers, regardless of gender, and it might have become lost in the focus of attention on the under-achievement of boys.